XUNICEF News and Views

Like a paradox, my career of UNICEF (23 years) will have ended just the way it started, in humanitarian emergencies. In October 1993, Burundi was in chaos, after the assassination of the democratically elected Hutu president, carried out by Tutsi soldiers. This led to a deadly civil war. There were tens of thousands of victims, mostly of Hutu origin, a sad omen that would portend the horrific genocide of Rwandan Tutsis the following year. During the last years of my UNICEF career in EMOPS, New York, I visited several countries facing civil war emergencies. As I reflect on these experiences, it is clear to me that UNICEF’s support on the ground in the 90s was very different from those of the 2010s. There is no comparison to be made. There is no nostalgia for the past; it is simply that the political and social contexts of these bygone times have perfectly contributed to initiatives which would appear to us today to be perfectly incongruous. As proof of this, three anecdotes are clearly ...

Comme un paradoxe, ma carrière à l’UNICEF (vingt trois années) aura débuté comme elle s’est terminée, dans les urgences humanitaires. En octobre 1993, c’est le chaos au Burundi, après l’assassinat du président d’ethnie hutu démocratiquement élu, assassinat perpétré par les militaires tutsi, ce qui entraînera une guerre civile meurtrière. Plusieurs dizaines de milliers de victimes, principalement d’origine hutu, comme un triste présage en miroir de l’horrible génocide des tutsis rwandais l’année suivante. Et dans les dernières années de ma carrière, au sein d’EMOPS NY, j’ai séjourné dans plusieurs pays confrontés à des urgences de guerre civile. Repensant à ces épisodes, il m’apparaît clairement que les interventions que l’UNICEF a soutenues sur le terrain dans les années 90 étaient bien singulièrement différentes de celles des années 2010. Il n’y a pas de comparaison à faire, il n’y a pas de nostalgie du passé, il y a simplement que les contextes politiques et sociaux de ces époques an...

Sleep proved impossible for me. Heavy firing went on through the night. As I was in a war zone, perhaps this seems not so surprising. The surprise came in the morning when I learned that the shooting had only been a celebration in honor of a Coptic saint. It was only my third day in Croatia. I had arrived in Zagreb as the new head of Croatia office in the middle of December 1994 and soon after found myself on the road to Knin, the headquarters of the self-declared Republic of the Serbian Krajina. The trip from Zagreb to Knin was only 300 kms but took us over 6 hours, due to heavy snow and constant stops at checkpoints.

Most of us who worked in UNICEF in the 1980s and early 1990s know - or at least claim we know - a fair amount about Jim Grant. Less well known is his history before coming to UNICEF. What follows has been gleaned from a variety of books about Grant and his parents, and in particular about his famous father, Dr. John B. Grant. I am grateful to the authors of the various books on Jim Grant, in particular Maggie Black, Peter Adamson, and Adam Fifield. Even with those sources at hand, many gaps remain in what we know about Jim and his life before UNICEF. If you can help fill those gaps, I will be grateful. Jim was born in May 1922 at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital. For the Chinese, it was the year of the Dog, who in mythology was the loyal partner of the invincible God Erlang who helps him capture monsters. Indeed, Jim went on to capture monsters - at least the kind that threaten children. Peking Union Medical College Hospital Staff Housing at the College John Grant - age 2...

The World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA), Jomtien, Thailand, 5-9 March 1990 by Nigel Fisher, Former Deputy Executive Secretary, WCEFA Lunches of chicken with Ministry of Education counterparts, expertly incinerated (the chicken, that is, not the counterparts) by a UNICEF Representative in an apartment in Aden, can have far-reaching consequences. Along with working on UCI in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in the mid to late 80s, UNICEF Aden also worked closely with the education ministry on rolling out a nationwide literacy programme, with a particular focus on women’s literacy. This somehow came to the attention of Nyi Nyi in far-off New York and in late 1988, I was unceremoniously yanked out of the PDRY to go to New York. Together with a few other agencies, UNICEF was exploring the possibility of launching a major global initiative on basic education for all and I was to join the team. Manzoor Ahmed was our education chief at that time. These discussions...

I moved to New York on April Fool’s Day, 1990, to take the lead in mobilizing NGOs around the World Summit for Children – at the time, the largest gathering in history of heads of State. It was an exciting period – the Convention on the Rights of the Child had just been adopted by the General Assembly, and we were full of optimism that we could make the world a better place for children. That Summit was then followed by a series of world conferences in which we continued to lobby for our priorities, in partnership with a wide range of NGOs: the Vienna Conference on Human Rights in 1993, the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, the Copenhagen Summit on Social Development and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, both in 1995. (I wasn’t involved in the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in 1992). The Vienna Conference was particularly important, because it really brought home the challenge we faced in making children a p...

The Politics of Denial: Lessons from a Master The decline in breastfeeding – and the increasingly aggressive marketing of breastmilk substitutes – first appeared on the agenda of the World Health Assembly in 1974. There was alarming evidence of the negative impact of this trend on child health. The demands for action grew stronger over the next several years, with a call for limitations on the marketing of breastmilk substitutes achieving broad-based support at a WHO-UNICEF meeting in October 1979, heated negotiations occurring throughout the next year and the adoption of an International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes (the Code) in January 1981. So why was the Code such a hot-button topic for UNICEF and what did it have to do with me? Here’s how it went down: From the outset, the US government, representing the interests of breastmilk substitute manufacturers (including the infamous Nestle) was dead set against the Code. A high-profile USAID official (Stephen Joseph) re...

 When you google ‘UNICEF Framework’, you will in all probability be directed to the mother of all conceptual frameworks, among a choice of very similarly looking colourful graphics:

The provision of supplies and equipment has been a part of UNICEF’s support since the organisation came into being to meet the needs of children in Europe at the end of the second world war. As the requirement for supplies increased a storage area was necessary and space was found in the 3rd basement of the United Nations Secretariat building in New York. It was clear that such warehousing was a stopgap measure and the search began for a suitable location. From the beginning different products were purchased in quantity by UNICEF and delivered from storage for use either as part of a set or as specific needs identified by the country for which they were destined. Thus products were purchased in different countries, delivered to a warehouse, stored, and then dispatched to the recipient country. The usual procedures for delivery of products from one country to another require the payment of import duty; to avoid this a “Freeport” location was required. A search was undertaken in Rotterda...

The Executive Board approved, in 1994, the Strategy on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Girls and Women. The paper provided the directions for our preparations for the Beijing Conference. Quietly, the Women in Development moniker was changed to Gender in Development Section. The Vienna Conference on Human Rights: The first success  “The Girl Child: An Investment in the Future” was hurriedly prepared in time for the distribution at the Vienna Conference on Human Rights, in June1993. However, dark clouds were forming. The idea of promoting gender equality through action for girls was not embraced by internationally renowned women’s rights activists. It was a wake-up call for us. Closely collaborating with the “Girls Lobby”, we succeeded in formulating Article 18 of the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action. It states: “The human rights of women and the girl child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights”. Alliance Building We then began t...

In 1992, I joined UNICEF Geneva Office as a communications officer with a focus on child rights. A few hours after taking up my post, I was called in to a meeting with the Chief of Communications and her Deputy. They announced that they had changed my TOR. The new ones spelt Emergency Communications Officer. Did I agree? I did. That was the start of years of living out of a suitcase. Within days, I was in Tirana, Albania, to help the newly established UNICEF office set up its communications capacity. Albania was in flux after the fall of communism and elections were being prepared. My first memory is the sight of hundreds of bunkers, which looked like igloos, on the drive into Tirana. There were over 170,000 military bunkers countrywide, only a fraction of those which had been planned by the former dictator. My time started when I was told that there was no hotel accommodation available and that I would be staying with an Albanian family. That should be interesting, I thought...

Son preference and its impact on Indian society is notoriously well known. The belief that only sons can perform cremations/funerals of their parents is pervasive. Their entitlement to inheritance is assured except in matrilineal communities. Parental neglect and poor attention to a girl’s development is rationalized by the notion that she is ‘ paraya dhan ’ literally meaning someone else’s wealth - ergo, her marital family, so why invest the limited family resources. A good harvest prompts child marriages in farming communities. Girls toil alongside their mothers taking care of their siblings and housework. Educated girls are not generally preferred as brides which is another hurdle to girls’ education. Age old customs of dedicating pre-puberty girls to temples ( devadasis and yellama ) perpetuates the double whammy of caste and gender, exploiting girls from poor uneducated families. How does the neglect of girls get manifested? While the phenomenon of low female to male sex ratio wa...

One feature I had not expected that would become forever present in “life with UNICEF” was the capacity to learn fast. Ability to adapt quickly and appropriately to the latest multi-sectoral, multi-tasking challenge developed in NYHQ or wherever was one indicator of a successful staff member. That realization of having to know, even if initially you didn’t know, hit me from Day One, 1979. Piled up on my desk were about 65 questionnaires. My first task as Senior Adviser, Family and Child Welfare, as Program Division Director Ralph Eckert explained, was to consolidate a survey which my predecessor, Ms. Titi Memet had initiated. Then to turn it into a Program Directive. The topic? Female circumcision! I had never even heard of female circumcision before then, yet I was to generate guidelines for country offices on how to deal with the practice. Female circumcision had been gaining some attention among women’s groups in the United States and Europe, some of whom had been badgering UNICEF...